The Legacy Media's War On Conservatives

At the Corner, Andrew McCarthy explores the L.A. Times’ hit-piece on Clarence Thomas’ wife, Ginni:

So let me make sure I have this straight. If you’re a “progressive” lawyer who volunteers to represent America’s enemies for free in offensive lawsuits brought against the American people during wartime, and then you are placed in a policy-making position in the Justice Department, we’re not allowed even to suggest that you be identified, much less to infer that the sympathies that impelled you to donate your talents to al Qaeda might affect your decision-making at DOJ.

If you’re a hard-Left ideologue and pro-abortion zealot like Dawn Johnsen, who has analogized unwanted pregnancy to slavery, we’re supposed to avert our eyes from your record and put you in charge of DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, an influential government position that calls more than any other for even-handed, non-partisan, non-ideological scholarship.

But if you are the wife of a Supreme Court justice — not the Supreme Court justice himself, mind you, but the justice’s wife — and you dare to have your own career and further dare to be a public conservative who defends core American principles of individual liberty against the Leftist onslaught, we are supposed to assume that the impartiality of the Supreme Court (on which the wife of the justice does not sit) has been compromised.

That’s the upshot of the Los Angeles Times hit job this morning by Kathleen Hennessey on Ginni Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. It’s an unmitigated disgrace.

I’ve looked through other articles by Ms. Hennessey, searching for one about whether she thought the high court would be compromised by the appointment of Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Prior to her appointment, Justice Sotomayor herself — not her spouse, herself — was a Leftist activist (board member and top policy maker at the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education fund) who infamously opined that a “wise Latina” is more apt to make good decisions that a mere “white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Doesn’t seem to have troubled Ms. Hennessey, though.

Nor did the journalist fret about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Ginsburg also had an extensive pre-Supreme Court career in Leftist causes (e.g., co-director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project in the 1970s) — and on while on the Court she has been a reliable Leftist vote who, for example, champions resort to international law to interpret the U.S. Constitution and, in a bizarre extrajudicial comment, favorably linked abortion with eugenics (“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion” (emphasis added)).

No, none of that bothers the media. The Court’s ballyhooed “impartiality” is only threatened because a conservative male justice is married to a conservative woman who has a life and career of her own, which was once thought to be the feminist ideal.

Read the whole thing, and then check out Ed Morrissey’s take, along with his interview with Mrs. Thomas. To get a sense of the mindset that drives the L.A. Times, and much of the legacy media, don’t miss Hugh Hewitt’s interview last month with James Rainey of the L.A. Times, as transcribed on Hugh’s site.

Update: Tammy Bruce on “Today’s Racist Tea Party Activist.”